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Our Weirdness Is Free
by Gabriella Coleman
The logic of Anonymous—online army, agent of chaos, and
seeker of justice.
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/15/contents/our_weirdness_is_free

“Our Weirdness Is Free” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work
project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New
York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the
New York Council for the Humanities.
ANONYMOUS, WHICH CAME INTO BEING on the online message board 4chan
eight years ago, is by nature and intent difficult to define: a name employed by
various groups of hackers, technologists, activists, human rights advocates, and
geeks; a cluster of ideas and ideals adopted by these people and centered around
the concept of anonymity; a banner for collective actions online and in the real
world that have ranged from fearsome but trivial pranks to technological support for
Arab revolutionaries. In recent months, Anonymous has announced audacious plans
to take down the seemingly invincible Mexican drug cartels; instigated and
promoted the nationwide Occupy movement; and shut down the website of the
Florida Family Association, which is behind the campaign against the television
show All-American Muslim, and leaked the names and credit card numbers of
donors. These actions are sometimes peaceful and legal, sometimes disruptive and
illicit, often existing in a moral and legal gray area. Anonymous acts to advance
political causes but also for sheer amusement.
The seemingly paradoxical nature of Anonymous has much to do with its origins on
4chan, which has become immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious since it
launched in 2003. 4chan is an image board composed of fifty-one topic-based
forums ranging from anime to health and fitness and is widely perceived to be one
of the most offensive quarters of the Internet. The “random” forum, /b/, teems with
pornography, racial slurs, and humor derived from defilement. Participants
communicate in a language that seems to have reduced English to a bevy of vicious
epithets, sneers, and text-message abbreviations. This may be shocking to
outsiders, but for insiders it is the normal state of affairs, and one of 4chan’s
defining and most endearing qualities.1
Today Anonymous is associated with an irreverent, insurgent brand of activist
politics. Before 2008, however, the moniker was used almost exclusively to stage
pranks—to “troll,” in Internet parlance, targeting people and organizations,
desecrating reputations, and revealing humiliating information. For instance, in
2009, Anonymous sought to “ruin” an eleven-year-old girl named Jessi Slaughter
after her homemade video monologues, which had gained some notoriety on tween
gossip site StickyDrama, were posted on 4chan. Anonymous was stirred to action by
Slaughter’s brazen boasts—she claims in one video that she will “pop a glock in

your mouth and make a brain slushie”—and published her phone number, address,
and Twitter username, inundating her with hateful emails and threatening prank
calls, circulating Photoshopped images of her and satiric remixes of her videos.
When her father recorded his own rant, claiming to have “backtraced” Jessi’s
tormenters and reported them to the “cyber police,” he also became an object of
ridicule (and a meme). Because of such antics, Fox News had in 2007 dubbed 4chan
the
1 Many assume that 4Chan is populated entirely by testosterone-fueled teenaged
boys, but since conversations are not archived and users post anonymously, it is
impossible to glean demographic data. (4chan is thus unique in an Internet
ecosystem largely characterized by the surveillance of users and the mining of their
consumer preferences by and for advertisers.)
Definition of Anonymous taken from 4chan message board.
"Internet hate machine”—a barb embraced, if ironically, by Anonymous, which
responded with a grim parodic video claiming to be “the face of chaos,” “harbingers
of judgment” who “laugh at the face of tragedy.” But in the past few years
Anonymous has adopted the strategy of trolling as part of somewhat
straightforward protest campaigns. The question is: How and why has the anarchic
“hate machine” been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political
operations of recent times?
Looking for insights into Anonymous’s surprising metamorphosis, I began an
anthropological study of the group in 2008. That year Anonymous launched a
trolling attack against the Church of Scientology, which within mere weeks came to
include earnest street demonstrations organized using conventional activist
strategies. Anonymous became even more widely known two years later as a result
of Operation Payback, a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign that
paralyzed the websites of financial institutions refusing to transfer funds from
donors to WikiLeaks, in the name of free speech. But even then, Anonymous was
still generally misunderstood, described by news reports alternately as “online
activists,” “global cyberwarriors,” and “cyber vigilantes.”
The nature of this confusion is not hard to understand. Beyond a foundational
commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no
consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly
devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action
around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful,
sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a
collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the
portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent an "You done goofed!" Jessi
Slaughter and her father respond to Anonymous.
ethos as much as an objective. Even as Anonymous has distinguished itself from
4chan and from trolling for its own sake, the underlying character of the group—and
the form of its politics—are still intimately connected to the raucous culture of
online message boards. (For more on the culture of anonymity, see David
Auerbach’s extensive essay “Anonymity as Culture,” also published in this issue of
Triple Canopy.)

The Painted Smile
The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times.
The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the
Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; more recently, the Yes Men
have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-

foot-long golden penis (“employee visualization appendage”) at a WTO textileindustry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the
management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the
conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which
substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles
that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups
were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a
vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and
organic political evolution, along with its combination of feral tricksterism and
expert online organizing.
Which is to say Anonymous follows a logic all its own. Partly because of its maverick
image and lulzy

A small fire demands constant tending.
A bonfire can be let alone.
A conflagration spreads.
@papersplx
antics, the group has attracted considerable attention—Anonymous was recently
named Time’s number four person of the year in the magazine’s “people’s choice”
poll—and a tremendous number of adherents, or Anons. Of course, the group’s
organizing principle—anonymity—makes it impossible to tell how many people are
involved.
Participation is fluid, and Anonymous includes hard-core hackers as well as people
who contribute by editing videos, penning manifestos, or publicizing actions. Then
there are myriad sympathizers who may not spend hours in chat rooms but will
heed commands to join DDoS attacks and repost messages sent by Anonymous
Twitter accounts, acting as both mercenary army and street team. Anonymous has
developed a loose structure, with technical resources such as Internet Relay Chat
(IRC) being run and controlled by a handful of elites, but these elites have erected
no formal barriers to participation, such as initiation guidelines or screening
processes, and ethical norms tend to be established consensually and enforced by
all.
Political operations often come together
Dear Fox News video by Anonymous, 2007.
haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically,
along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it
does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for
opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of
Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly
manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must
continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily
devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But
acting “on the wing” leverages
Anonymous’s fluid structure, giving Anons an advantage, however temporary, over
traditional institutions—corporations, states, political parties—that function
according to unified plans. De Certeau pointedly distinguishes this as strategy,
which “postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base

from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats … can be
managed.” Anonymous is not bound to any such place, and therefore does not
harbor what de Certeau calls “a Cartesian attitude.”
For example: One infamous attack against security firm HBGary gained steam only
after hackers discovered, in the course of some retaliatory trolling, that multiple
security companies were conspiring to undermine WikiLeaks and discredit its
supporters. Because anyone can take the name—as many different, seemingly
unrelated affiliations have done—operations can be intensified quickly after a
weakness on the part of the target is discovered, or shut down immediately if
trouble or internal controversy arises. And so Anonymous’s overall direction remains
somewhat opaque even to those on the inside.
Nevertheless, Anonymous’s activities, however disparate and paradoxical on their
surface, have
enlarge image
Letter posted by Anonymous on the hacked HBGary website, 2011.
tapped into a deep disenchantment with the political status quo, without positing a
utopian vision—or any overarching agenda—in response. Anonymous acts in a way
that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful
of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher
Ernst Bloch calls “the principle of hope.” In his three-volume work Das Prinzip
Hoffnung (1938-47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs,
symbols, and artifacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy
tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better world is always in our midst.
Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in
songs, poems, and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or
even utopia—there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history—
but they do hold latent possibilities that in certain conditions can be activated and
perhaps lead to new political realities. “The door that is at least half-open, when it
appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope,” Bloch writes.
The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet
seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope. What started as a network
of trolls has become, much of the time, a force for good in the world; what started
as a reaction to the Church of Scientology has come to encompass free-speech
causes from Tunisia to Zuccotti Park. While Anonymous has not put forward any
programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading
them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated
with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, “transparent” social networking
of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading individualism for
collectivism.

The Ways of the Mask
If one term embodies the paradoxical and contradictory character of Anonymous—
which is now serious in action and frivolous by design; made up of committed
activists and agents of mischief—it is lulz. These four letters denote the pleasures
attained from generating and sharing jokes and memes such as LOLcats and the
cartoon pedophile mascot Pedobear. But they also suggest how easily and casually
trolls can violently undermine the sense of security enjoyed by carefree denizens of
the “real world” by, for instance, ordering scores of unpaid pizzas to be delivered to
a single address, or publishing one’s phone number and private communications
and credit-card numbers and hard-drive contents and any other information one
might think to be “personal” or secure. Perhaps most important, lulz-oriented

actions puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives, our
aesthetic sensibilities, the inviolability of the world as it is; trolls invalidate that
world by gesturing toward the possibility for Internet geeks to destroy it—to pull the
carpet from under us—whenever they feel the urge and without warning.
Nowhere is this sense of a world outside of, and formed in opposition to, the one
most of us inhabit more palpable than on 4chan. Anonymity is essential to 4chan,
too; one might call anonymity its ground rule, and the dominant aspect of the
culture the board has created. While trolling has often been the purview of boastful,
self-aggrandizing cliques—for instance, the Gay Niggers’ Association of America and
its ex-president, Weev—on 4chan trolling is largely crowd-sourced, and participants
are strongly discouraged from identifying themselves, instead focusing on the
collective pursuit of “epic wins.”
Anonymous began trolling the Church of Scientology in January 2008 in pursuit of
such an epic win, impelled by Scientology’s threats to sue websites that refused to
take down the infamous internal recruitment video of Tom Cruise praising the
church’s efforts to “create new and better realities.” Per the Barbra Streisand Effect
(any attempt to censor information that has already been published only serves to
draw more attention), the leaked video went viral. Though intended as serious and
persuasive, legitimating Scientology through the power of Cruise’s celebrity,
Internet geeks (and most others) viewed the video as a pathetic (not to mention
hilarious) attempt to bestow credibility on pseudoscience. Once the church
deployed its lawyers, one participant told me, Anonymous switched from mischief to
“ultra-coordinated motherfuckary”: DDoS attacks to jam Scientology websites,
ordering unpaid pizzas to churches across North America, sending images of nude
body parts to church fax machines, and relentless phone pranking, especially of the
Dianetics hotline.
Anonymous’s willingness to wreak havoc in pursuit of lulz, but also in defense of
free speech and in opposition to the malfeasances and deceptions of Scientology,
calls to mind the nineteenth-century European “social bandits” described by
historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels.
These bandits are members of mafias, secret societies, religious sects, urban mobs,
and outlaw gangs; they are ultimately thugs, but, according to Hobsbawn, they
nurture a faintly revolutionary spirit: Often when they plunder they also redistribute
goods to the poor, or offer them protection against other bandits. Hobsbawm
defines the bandits as “pre-political” figures “who have not yet found, or only begun
to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world.”
Anonymous has worked toward finding that language with remarkable celerity since
it launched Project Chanology. Soon after the DDoS attacks and pranks, Anonymous
shifted tactics, disseminating incriminating facts about Scientology and forging
bonds with an older generation of dissidents, highlighting the church’s use of
censorship and abuse of human rights. An extempore spout of trolling had thus
given birth to an earnest activist endeavor. Anonymous had emerged from its online
sanctuary and set to improve the world. According to Hobsbawm, this is a
conventional path taken by bandits and revolutionaries alike. “The recognition that
profound and fundamental changes take place in society does not depend on the
belief that utopia is realizable,” he writes.
Anonymous "Raidfag Wench" protesting the Church of Scientology, 2008.
Ironically, Anonymous’s transformation coincided with the publication of a video
lampooning Scientology: Message to Scientology, which calls for a “systematic”
dismantling of the church for “our own enjoyment.” The video, one of many urging
people to take action against the church, provoked a discussion among Anons in IRC
rooms about whether they should protest in earnest or remain faithful to

Anonymous’s madcap roots. One of the editors of Message to Scientology
summarized:
<Av>there were people who didnt think anonymous or 4chan should take to the
streets
<Av>but the consensus to actually do it came relatively easily for us after the video
<Av>it seemed to be great timing, the right video at the right moment
And so on February 10, 2008, thousands of Anons and supporters hit the streets in
cities around the world for a day of action against Scientology, with events
straddling the line between serious political protest and carnivalesque shenanigans.
Six months after being labeled “the Internet hate machine,” Anonymous had legions
of followers in the real world—not just geeks and hackers hammering at their
keyboards—who were seizing on the group’s name, on its ethic of anonymity and
concomitant iconography. That evening, men in Guy Fawkes masks and black suits
with signs announcing “We Are the Internet” could be seen on cable-news shows
around the world. A common refrain at these protests, repeated to me by one
demonstrator in Dublin: “At least our weirdness is free.”
For many Anons, the campaign validated work that had preceded Project Chanology:
the organization of energies and antagonisms into a political form, through
experimentation and practice. In the following weeks and months they continued to
protest Scientology’s relentless legal and extralegal crackdown on its critics,
especially those who dared to disclose or circulate internal documents (which the
church refers to as “secret scriptures”). Other Anons simply returned to their
corners of the Internet; many of them now contest Anonymous’s incipient political
sensibility, deriding their peers as “moralfags” on 4chan, preferring to troll middle
school girls and trade pornography.2 But the moralfags have not disavowed
deviance—it is, after all, part of the fabric of their culture. In 2009, for instance, a
group of anons executed Operation Slickpubes, in which a streaker slathered in
Vaseline
2 It is common on 4chan to use “-fag” as a derisive, if not actually homophobic,
suffix.
Message to Scientology video by Anonymous, 2008.
and pubic hair terrorized the New York City Scientology headquarters. Such hijinks
contrast with the moral narrative implied by Hobsbawm, whereby bandits could only
become viable political actors by giving up their menacing tactics and buying into
the conventional forms of power. For Hobsbawm, the bandit is pitted against “the
forces of the new society which he cannot understand. At most he can fight it and
seek to destroy it.” This explains why “the bandit is often destructive and savage
beyond the range of his myth.” Today’s digital bandits, however, understand the
forces of the new society and are adept at harnessing them as means of creative
destruction.

#BotnetsforJustice
It is not hard to understand why Scientology is an ideal target among the many
geeks and hackers who make up the ranks of Anonymous. Scientology is a
proprietary and secretive religion of pseudoscience, complete with a cultish idiom
and customs, in thrall of fake technology (most prominently the e-meter) and
“advanced technology,” the church’s term for its spiritual teachings. Scientology
exists almost as a fun-house-mirror inversion of the geek and hacker world, which is
so heavily invested in the production and use of workable technology and the
eradication of nonsense. Scientology is the evil doppelgänger of anonymous, geeky

Internet culture. But would that desire to congregate under the same alias—what
media theorist Marco Desiiris calls an “improper name”—be diminished by a less
perfect enemy?
Apparently not—or, the perfect ally works just as well. Two years after Operation
Chanology was launched, a different group of Anons initiated a second wave of
Operation Payback, again without much foresight or planning. According to an
Anonymous source, the enterprise was organized by AnonOps (a branch of
Anonymous) on IRC,
announced on a blog, publicized on 4chan and Twitter, and finally picked up by the
mainstream media. Thanks to the political firestorm caused by the release of a
cache of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, AnonOps was able to command
an infantry of thousands (assisted by botnets) to paralyze the websites of PayPal
and Mastercard by running a program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon. “Someone in the
media noticed,” recalled one Anonymous participant who took part in the attack.
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:
A:

and within a few hrs
it went viral
we sat and watched numbers [of IRC channel population] rise
from around 70
which was about the lowest we had ever been
we were saying wow it’s gonna be 500 soon
(our previous high was ~700)
then we passed that
then we hit 1000
then the madness broke A: and we got to >7000
we had to suddenly increase

server numbers
A: and it was a crazy crazy time
A: we were stunned and a little frightened tbh [to be honest]
By the end of 2010, a new Anonymous army seemed to have arisen, and in the
ensuing months AnonOps worked to enable citizens to bypass government filtering
in Malaysia and hacked the agricultural-biotech giant Monsanto in the name of
environmental rights, among dozens of other campaigns. At the time, I had been
logging on to IRC as part of my anthropological research, building relationships with
people whom I knew only as handles, and often shepherding journalists to
Anonymous’s #reporter channel. As the operations multiplied, I became shackled to
my computer for nine months, spending hours and hours in various forums. I began
giving public lectures on Anonymous; videos were posted online, eliciting ample
commentary from Anons. (This is a salient feature of the work of ethnographers who
study what anthropologist Chris Kelty has jokingly called, contra the subaltern, the
“superaltern”: those highly educated geeks who not only speak for themselves but
talk back loudly and critically to those who purport to speak for them.)
enlarge image
Directions for participating in Operation Payback, posted by Anonymous, 2010.
By the end of January, Anonymous seemed to be devoting itself entirely to activist
campaigns, at the expense of mischief-making, and some Anons lamented the
waning of the lulz. though many more were invigorated by their contributing to the
historic toppling of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East. Prompted by the Tunisian
government's blocking WikiLeaks, Anonymous announced OpTunisia on January 2,
2011; soon after, AnonOps embarked on a series of so-called freedom operations to
support

the Arab Spring. Anonymous attacked government websites but soon began acting
more like a human rights advocacy group, enabling citizens to circumvent censors
and evade electronic surveillance and sending care packages with advice and
security tools. Those packages included this urgent and humorless note clarifying
the role of social media: “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor
televised or IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose the fight.” Though
many Anons were invigorated by contributing to the historic toppling of dictatorial
regimes in the Middle East, for others there could be no clearer evidence of the
ascendance of moralfags.
Then came Operation HBGary. In February Aaron Barr, CEO of the HBGary security
firm, claimed to have “pwned” Anonymous, discovering the real identities of top
operatives. In response, Anons commandeered Barr’s Twitter account and used it to
spew 140-character racial slurs while following the accounts of Justin Bieber, Gay
Pride, and Hitler. They hacked HBGary servers and downloaded 70,000 emails and
deleted files, wiped out Barr’s iPhone and iPad, then published the company’s data
alongside Barr’s private communications for good measure. Most remarkably,
Anonymous unearthed a document entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat,” which outlined
how HBGary Federal (a subsidiary dealing with federal contracts) and other security
companies might undermine WikiLeaks by submitting fake documents to the site.
There was also evidence of plans to ruin the careers of WikiLeaks supporters,
among them Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald.
A small crew of AnonOps hackers had started with retaliatory trolling and had ended
up exposing what seemed to be a conspiracy so damning that members of Congress
called for an investigative committee to be established. Given that these were
private firms, the evidence obtained by AnonOps could never have been procured
through legal channels such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Previously,
Anonymous rarely hacked to expose security flaws and access politically sensitive
information, preferring to deface and disable websites. The success of Operation
HBGary launched new wings of Anonymous composed of smaller, more exclusive
hacker crews dedicated to exposing security vulnerabilities and generating massive
disclosures of emails and documents, further aligning the hackers with the goals of
WikiLeaks. Some Anons took issue with the Poster regarding Anonymous's attack on
the website of the government of Nepal, OpEverest, 2011.
collateral damage wrought by Operation HBGary, especially the excessive leaking of
personal information. The necessarily clandestine nature of such hacks was also
criticized by those who saw it as counter to the ethos of transparency. At the time,
however, most Anons were thrilled. One described the collective effervescence in a
private message to me during the post-hack chat-room “celebration”:
AAA: great work was being accomplished
AAA: but there was a major deficit of lulz
biella: yep and now it has been restocked
AAA: i think this is more of a surplus
The message to Anonymous participants and onlookers was clear: Anonymous had
not become Human Rights Watch; the pursuit of a more “mature” agenda did not
mean an end to lulz.

Here Comes Nobody
Upending the life of a security executive, publishing reams of personal information
and corporate communications obtained illegally, and broadcasting the whole affair
on Twitter may seem anathema to traditional activists, who might rather urge
citizens to call their local representatives. But such acts of lulzmaking are magnetic

on two levels, producing spectacular, shocking, and humorous events and images
that attract media attention while simultaneously binding together the collective
and rejuvenating its spirit. This runs counter to the reductive arguments about
whether or not online organizing can breed the conditions necessary for serious,
effective activism (see Clay Shirky in the affirmative, Malcolm Gladwell in the
negative); the pursuit of lulz, and the shared technology used to do so, are means
of creating a common, participatory culture. (Of course, the pursuit of lulz is also an
end in and of itself.) Anonymous is sustained—and at times enlarged—not only by
the effective use of communication technologies but by a culture that thrives on the
tension between order and disorder, cool and hot, seriousness and lulz, anonymity
and transparency.
Though Anonymous participants must cloak their
enlarge image
AnonOps participants discuss the choice of targets for their attacks.
identities and often conceal their actions, the group demands transparency from
state and corporate actors. To Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg, transparency means
sharing personal information constantly; he has gone so far as to declare the death
of privacy.3 Anonymous offers a provocative antithesis to the logic of constant selfpublication, the desire to attain recognition or fame. The ethos of Anonymous is in
opposition to celebrity, with the group configured as e pluribus unum: one from
3 While in 2008 Zuckerberg avowed that privacy is “the vector around which
Facebook operates,” he now views Facebook’s treatment of personal information in
less reverent terms: “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we
just went for it.” Nevertheless, contradictorily, he maintains that Facebook is merely
“updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”
many. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discern what or whom lies behind the mask.
In a world where we post the majority of our personal data online, and states and
corporations wield invasive tools to collect and market the rest, there is something
profoundly hopeful in Anonymous’s effacement of the self (even if there is
something deeply ironic and troubling about doxing and hacking in order to make
that point). The domain of Anonymous enables participants to practice a kind of
individuality beyond what anthropologist David Graeber, building on the the seminal
work of C.B. Macpherson, identifies as “possessive individualism,” defined as “those
deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything
around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”
While anonymity often functions as an unspoken ethical imperative—a default mode
of operation—Anons have also explicitly theorized the sublimation of identity. For
instance, while preparing an op-ed for the Guardian last winter, dozens of Anons
contributed to a document outlining the power and limits of anonymity. “It is the
nameless collective and the procedures by which it is governed, which in the end
prevail over the necessarily biased and single-minded individual,” one comment
reads. “Yet, at the same time, the individual’s ability to contribute to this communal
process of the production of knowledge has never been greater.”
These ideas are often tested in practice. In late January 2011, I shared an article
about Anonymous from the Washington Post on one of the group’s IRC channels.
After reading the piece, many participants were indignant: The featured Anon had
revealed details about his personal life to the reporter, an infraction only made
worse by the fact that he had contributed little to recent operations. One highly
respected IRC operator assessed the situation: “Attempting to use all the work that
so many have done for your personal promotion is something i will not tolerate.” A
number of Anons then called this person into a different channel, asked him to

justify his actions. Unsatisfied with his answers, they z-lined him, banning him from
this particular server. (A3 is the offending Anon; A0 is the IRC operator.)
A0:
AS:
AS:
A0:
AS:

talk now
A3
A3
before i remove you from here
A3

AN: A3 queir
AN: quiet
AS: cus he knows hes fucked
A3: hahahaa
AS: ohai
A3: you believe half of that shit is true
A0: you thinki ts funy?
[...]
AS: it seems about spot on from what Ive heard and seen
A0: youre saying [the newspaper] lieD?
A0: I WILL BRING THEM HERE NOW
A3: Because I would never state where I live
A0: and we will see
A3: First of all
A0: and what my parents do
AS: well you tell us you are in X [the city where A3 lives]
A0: yo would if you seek glory
A3: I live in X
AS: derp
A3: That's all
A0: we all know where you live
AS grabs the shotgun
AS: A0 lets go shall we?
A3 *runs*
AS Master-IT brings the M16
A3 left the room (quit: Z:lined ( dunbass)).
Yet even as Anons collectively enforce a prohibition against seeking personal fame,
they do not suppress individuality. Anonymous is not a united front, but a hydra, a
rhizome, comprising numerous different networks and working groups that are often
at odds with one another. For instance, few of the Anons participating in Project
Chanology were fans of the DDoS campaigns that were at first the main political
weapon of AnonOps. Some, if not all, in the AnonOps network think the Project
Chanology network is too small and narrowly focused to be effective. In recent
weeks, these tensions have become more palpable thanks to actions organized by
an offshoot called Antisec, which made donations to charities from stolen creditcard accounts in honor of "LulzXmas." One longtime Anon accused Antisec of being
“destructive and malicious and serv[ing] no good purpose other than to bring heat
on this [Anonops] network.” But even if Anons don’t always agree about what is
being done under the auspices of Anonymous, they tend to respect the fact that
anyone can assume the moniker. Of course, despite the lack of stable hierarchy
some Anons are more active and influential than others. Anonymous abides by a
particular strain of meritocratic populism, with highly motivated individuals or
groups extending its networked architecture by contributing time, labor, and
attention to existing enterprises or by starting their own as they see fit.
This has all left the news media quite puzzled, especially as worldwide coverage has
ballooned in the wake of Project Chanology, Operation HBGary, and Operation BART,
launched against San Francisco’s mass-transit agency this summer after it shut

down cellular service in train tunnels to disrupt a planned protest against police
violence. Anonymous has become a paradox of the age of twenty-four-hour
infotainment: a cause célèbre in opposition to celebrity. Very few Anons have come
forward to reveal details about themselves, despite the solicitude of the media. At
the same time, Anonymous has succeeded in spreading its message as widely as
possible, through every media channel at its disposal—in contrast to criminal groups
that seek to remain hidden at all
enlarge image
Open letter from Anonymous regarding the campaign against San Francisco's Bay
Area Rapid Transit, 2011.
costs. Anonymous manages to achieve spectacular visibility and individual
invisibility at once. Even after studying Anonymous for years and recently getting to
know some of the more active participants (if mostly only virtually), my impression
of the group is one of faint figures lurking in the shadows.

TL;DR
In June of last year, NATO published a report entitled “Information and Information
Security,” which called for Anonymous to be infiltrated and dismantled. “Observers
note that Anonymous is becoming more and more sophisticated and could
potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files,” the report
reads. “Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have
thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership.” In July, Anonymous
hackers infiltrated NATO, just days after sixteen alleged Anons were arrested in the
US, fourteen of them in connection with Operation Payback. (Scores of alleged
Anons had previously been arrested in the UK, Spain, and Turkey.)
The impossibility of forming any comprehensive, consistent picture of Anonymous is
precisely what makes the group so unsettling to governments. Anonymous has, until
last summer’s arrests, effectively evaded state power. But even while eluding
surveillance, Anonymous has worked to expose the collection and mining of
personal information by governments and corporations—and in doing so deflated
the notion that such a thing as “private information” exists, as opposed to
information in the public sphere. This distinction is one of the foundations of the
neoliberal state, the very means by which individuality is constituted—and tracked.
Anonymous has made it clear that there’s no difference between what we imagine
to be our private and public selves—between singular individuals and fragmented
"dividuals," in Gilles Deleuze’s terms; or, at least, Anonymous has revealed that the
protection of information (which helps guarantee that difference) by a benevolent
security apparatus is a myth. At the same time, Anonymous has put forward its own
model—the practice of anonymity—for maintaining that very distinction, suggesting
that citizens must be the guardians of their own individuality, or determine for
themselves how and when it is reduced into data packets.
This message is inextricable from the platform Anonymous has established for
thousands of individuals to collectively articulate dissent and to combat particular
corporate and government actions, such as the passage of the controversial
National Defense Authorization Act on New Year’s Eve. By unpredictably fusing
conventional activism with transgression and tricksterism, Anonymous has captured
the attention of an incredible variety of admirers and skeptics. And even while
empowering individuals who take part in Anonymous campaigns, the network has
steadfastly avoided any reformist agenda, always pointing to the disquieting fact
that existing political channels so often are unlikely or unable to accommodate the
demands and represent the needs of most people, no matter how clearly and
correctly they are communicated.

Since last summer’s arrests Anonymous has dispersed, becoming even more
decentralized, with participants relocating to obscure nodes and communicating
through private IRC channels; even the AnonOps IRC network where I have spent so
much time in the past year vanished for more than a month due to internal strife
and a vigorous DDoS attack. But as Anons have burrowed deeper underground, the
reach of their icons has increased, especially after Anonymous began acting as a
crucial, though informal, public-relations wing for Occupy Wall Street in the fall,
generating videos and images and circulating information supporting the
movement’s aims. (Many Anons have since become involved in various Occupy
groups as organizers or by providing technology support.)
One of Occupy Wall Street’s most powerful gestures has been to position its
radically democratic decision-making process, represented by the agora of the
General Assembly, against the reining corporate kleptocracy. Though this brand of
horizontalism has a rich history with many roots, there is a particularly strong
resonance in the relationship between the formal structure and the political
aspirations of Anonymous. And Anonymous is organized not only around a radical
democratic (at times chaotic and anarchic) structure but also around the very
concept of anonymity, here constituted as collectivity. The accumulation of too
much power—especially in a single point in (virtual) space—and prestige is not only
taboo but functionally very difficult. The lasting effect of Anonymous may have as
much to do with facilitating alternative practices of sociality—upending the
ideological divide between
Video made by Anonymous in support of Occupy Wall Street, 2011.
individualism and collectivism—as with attacks on monolithic banks and sleazy
security firms. This is the nature of the threat posed by Anonymous, and it is aptly
symbolized by the Guy Fawkes mask: a caricature of the face of a sixteenth-century
British failed regicide and the namesake of a holiday marked by bonfires celebrating
the preservation of the monarchy; used by a dystopian comic book and then
Hollywood film as the visage of anarchist terrorism and now turned into an icon of
resistance—everything and nothing at once.

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